Ego
I cycle through it.
The question isn’t whether you’ll feel it as a professional. It’s how long you stay in that feeling before doing something useful with what it’s actually trying to tell you.
Eustress is regular stress’s cousin. The eu is Greek for good. It’s the version that helps: the productive discomfort that sharpens your focus and pushes you to close a gap, whether it’s a skill gap or a knowledge gap. It makes you prepare more carefully for the room you’re about to walk into. Athletes train with it. The best of the best know how to aim it at something they can actually change. It’s the discomfort that drives progress.
The other kind keeps you awake rehearsing all the things that went badly and the conversations that haven’t happened. It clouds your read of situations where you need to be present. The things you did right hold no value, and everything wrong follows you home.
The difference, as far as I can tell, is whether the anxiety orbits something you can act on. What’s in your control, and what can you release? What someone thought of your presentation, your work, your writing, whether you got credit for work that got absorbed into a larger initiative, how you landed in a room where the politics were already set: none of that is yours to move.
What I can change is narrow and specific
How I show up tomorrow. Yesterday is gone. Whether I ask the question I’ve been avoiding. Whether I’m present, and whether my intention, my attention and my attitude are lined up with my goals. Whether I do the work that’s in front of me.
Design has a lot of invisible contribution, and as you move into leadership, you’re signing off for other people. Your work is attributed elsewhere, or shipped without the applause.
What can I actually do here? And have I actually done it?
That is ego. The thing that stops me from seeing that answer clearly. And that’s the thing I try to release, as best I can.